Letter to the Editor: UCSB’s San Joaquin Dorm Debacle

I am saddened that UCSB still plans to bulldoze right over the concerns of neighbors and double the density at the Santa Catalina/San Joaquin site. Housing belongs on campus, not half a mile away.

As for Marc Fisher’s smug “We don’t have to go to the Board of Supervisors” and his sneering gibe “It’s our most popular dorm!” at the meeting Thursday night, he knows full well that’s because it’s the only dorm where the students might get a car permit.

Your staff’s “Bambi meets Godzilla” attitude is inappropriate to a great educational institution and your own personal legacy, and reveals the contempt for the rest of us that has led to this poor decision.

UCSB proves with this project that its only real commitment is to dorm revenue, not to the environment or the community. Don’t throw us “green” bones; we don’t want to hear (as we did) that the students may be showering with recycled toilet water (and I doubt their parents really want to hear that either).

It appears you need to have your hearing checked. Students “showering with recycled toilet water”? C’mon.

» publius on 02.24.13 @ 07:28 PM

Ah, the golden toned voice of the Not In My Backyard neighbor, to some change
proposed on his street.

The University is the engine that runs the south coast economy. It’s to everyone’s
benefit that UCSB try to provide more housing for students, faculty, and staff at
or near their campus, on their own property.

Less traffic congestion everywhere else.

It seems that no matter where, how, or what the University tries to do to house
its people, there will always be angry voices arguing against it.

Imagine Etling bought his Goleta property the week before UCSB moved to its
present location (fifty years ago), so all this has genuinely taken him by surprise?

» AN50 on 02.27.13 @ 08:10 PM

UCSB is a great asset to the community, however they have a track record of doing what ever they want with little or no mitigation to the community their operations impact. It wasn’t always that way.

When the local NIMBY squads formed up in the early 70’s they unwittingly gave UCSB the greatest gift a community ever could, they told them they didn’t want any “growth inducing” roads, water projects or student housing. What they did not realize is they had no control over the campus as far as it increasing enrollment, which they did and are still doing.

The result is we have a campus which has added 10,000 more students and staff with little new housing, water development and no new traffic improvements. The campus just swelled up and the community took it on the chin. Now they want an additional 5000 students and 4000 staff, 9,000 more souls in our community and what are we getting for it? More traffic, more water and resource consumption and more growth inducement with no mitigation at all.

This proves once again that just saying no, like the democrat party does to budget proposals, is not planning, not resolving, just more lazy sloppy careless emotional gratification to that knee stuck in your forehead.

UCSB is not an economic engine, it is a facilitator but as for economics it is a consumer of far more wealth than it produces. Those professors and students who take the education and smarts they develop there and actually do something that adds real intrinsic wealth to the economy are the engine. Schools, like some government agencies (NASA for one) can facilitate economic growth by enhancement. But there is often a long lag between the expense and the reward.

What makes a campus like UCSB a real asset is a robust private economy that not only allows for its existence but operates in a synergistic environment where both benefit. If you want UCSB to be that facilitator and synergy to the local economy then you must work with them not against them. If you don’t like the negative impacts of a growing university then demand they mitigate those impacts, like widening roads, completing circulation loops and developing water resources, otherwise

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